This is the sixth issue we've published since we brought Streaming Media magazine to Europe, but I have to admit it feels like it's the one where we've finally hit our stride.

The 2009 Streaming Media Europe conference and trade show had much the same feel, frankly, even though it was our fourth since we brought the event back to London in 2006. Part of that has to do with familiarity, of course. But with both the magazine and the conference, hopefully we're feeling a bit less "foreign" to our readers and attendees; the Europeanstreaming world is certainly feeling a whole lot less foreign to me than it was when I first made the trip over.

It's never been my goal as editor or conference chair to impose a U.S.-centric view upon the European market, though I'll be the first to admit that I've sometimes needed a metaphorical swat upside the head to get the picture. The biggest challenge has been delineating where we can even confidently say there is a European market, and where we must acknowledge that what goes on in the Netherlands is fundamentally different than what goes on in the U.K., or that the challenges facing the Czech Republic are not the same as those facing Germany.

Our second annual Streaming Media Dream Team and Editors' Picks highlight both the unity and the diversity of the market we cover, with entrants from Barcelona and Oslo making their mark alongside those from London and Israel, a country whose influence in the world of online video cuts across both Europe and the U.S. At the same time, we present a case study from a German company,the MTV Europe Music Awards, and a Streaming Spotlight that examines the DutchMedia Hub's innovative cooperative approach to making the Netherlands the "digital gateway to Europe".

We're also expanding our Streaming Media Europe conference in London this October with additional events that will let us both dig deeper into a specific topic and reach organisations from outside the traditional Streaming Media purview.

The former will be the goal of the Content Delivery Summit, which will offer a 1-day, intensive look at content delivery issues as the pertain specifically to the European market. Rather than talk about how Akamai and Limelight are moving traffic for European content publishers, we'll be spotlighting the different models for content delivery beyond the traditional CDN as well as the implications of the increased involvement of telcos.

On the latter goal, expanding our reach, Online Video Strategies is a 2-day event designed for marketers, publishers, retailers, educators-anyone, really, for whom video is not their core business but who recognises the need to use video as a core component of their overall communications strategy.

These are people who don't necessarily care about CDNs and infrastructure, whose eyes glaze over at the talk of encoding parameters, but who are excited by the possibilities that video presents to them and their businesses.

We've signed on two topnotch co-chairs-Dom Robinson, formerly of Global-MIX on the Content Delivery Summit and longtime Streaming Media contributor Adrian Pennington for Online Video Strategies-to help program those events. Youcan reach any of us via the StreamingMediaGlobal.com website. And with your help, we can be sure to best represent both the commonality and the diversity that is streaming media in Europe.